C4C Brussels event – November 2013

Copyright & Research and Innovation Policy: The Case of Text and Data Mining

On 12 November, Copyright 4 Creativity (C4) organised, with the support of Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska and the Modern Poland Foundation (Fundacja Nowoczesna Polska), an event on text and data mining (TDM) in order to have the conversation that the European Commission’s Licences for Europe (L4E) did not allow us to undertake. Organised in the European Parliament. The event was co-hosted by Members of the European Parliament of different political groups, including Pawel Zalewski (Polish, EPP), Marietje Schaake (Dutch, ALDE) and Amelia Andersdotter (Swedish, Greens/EFA), and looked at the changes required to ensure the copyright framework in the European Union becomes fit-for-purpose for the digital society we live in.

Our hosting MEPs and other MEPs co-signed a letter to President Barroso on the need to reform the Information Society (‘InfoSoc’) Directive (2001/29/EC) in December 2012. The Commission responded with the launch of the ‘Licences for Europe’ initiative, which concluded on 13 November. Now, almost one year later, this event aimed to look back at what happened and how to move forward. In doing so, it brought together a broad range of stakeholders: MEPs from across the political spectrum, NGOs, industry representatives, and policy experts. The two panel session were moderated by Ms Eleonora Rosati of the University of Cambridge, who’s also a regular contributor to the 1709 and IPKat blogs.

Hosts

Amelia Andersdotter is a Member of the European Parliament. As part of the Greens/EFA political group she is a member of the Committee on Industry, Energy and Research. An expert on copyright, Amelia is a highly sought after international speaker and thought leader on topics pertaining to IT-policy and intellectúal property. She has been named one of the worlds ten most important internet activists for the year 2012.

Marietje Schaake is a Member of the European Parliament for the Dutch D66 within the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) political group. She serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, where she focuses on neighbourhood policy, human rights and internet freedom. In the Committee on Culture, Media, Education, Youth and Sports she works on Europe’s Digital Agenda and the role of culture and new media. In the Committee on International Trade she focuses on intellectual property rights, the free flow of information and the relation between trade and foreign affairs.

Paweł Zalewski is a Member of European Parliament with the European Peoples Party where he is a Vice-Chairman of the Committee on International Trade. After the Polish protests on ACTA he was appointed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk to defend the Polish position on the issue. Since then he has cooperated closely with Centrum Cyfrowe and Modern Poland Foundation on drafting proposals on reforming copyright at the EU level as the current regulations do not match the reality of the twenty first century.

Speakers’ Bios

Anne Bergman-Tahon is the Director of the Federation of European Publishers. A Belgian national, she did her Master in Medieval History from the Free University of Brussels and acquired postgraduate diplomas from King’s College London on copyright and related rights as well as the Free University of Brussels on copyright. She has been working for the Federation of European Publishers for almost 20 years as a copyright advisor and a deputy Director. Since 2004 she is the Director of the FEP. She is also a member of the ALAI (Belgian section)

Brian Hole is the founder and CEO of Ubiquity Press, a researcher-led, fully open access publisher based in London. In addition to the usual academic publications, Ubiquity Press has a particular focus on making research data and software openly available.

Paul Keller is copyright policy advisor and vice-chair of Kennisland, an Amsterdam based think-tank focused on innovation in the knowledge economy. Paul is an expert on open content and data licensing with a special focus on cultural heritage organizations and the creative industries. He is public project lead for Creative Commons in the Netherlands and serves as Collecting Societies Liaison for Creative Commons International, where he has been instrumental in negotiating cooperations between Creative Commons and various collective rights management organisations. Paul is also coordinating the copyright related aspects of Images for the Future, one of the biggest digitization projects for audio-visual heritage in Europe and is one of the the architects of the copyright licensing framework for Europeana.

Jarosław Lipszyc is the chairman of the Modern Poland Foundation – an organization that is running several projects defining frameworks for educative courses under Free licences. He was the initiator of the Opened list against the introduction of software patents and Opened list against DRM. In 2006-2009 he was a member of the Indeks 73 group. In 2012 he actively participated against the introduction of ACTA in Poland.

John McNaught is Deputy Director of the National Centre for Text Mining, NaCTeM, hosted by the University of Manchester. He has worked in the field of Natural Language Processing since 1979 with a continuing interest in development of resources such as text corpora and computational lexicons to support language technology. At NaCTeM, John is involved in developing text mining tools and services for researchers and professionals from a range of domains, from libraries to the publishing sector.

Wilfried Rütten is Director of the European Journalism Centre. He has worked in German public and private broadcasting as a reporter and producer (ARD, RTL-Group) as well as in journalism education. Before joining the EJC he was the head of school for digital television at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg, Austria.

Nilu is the CTO and co-founder of Sparrho.com, the intelligent discovery platform for scientific information. He oversees the technical strategy and management of the company, and is dedicated to building a team of top-notch engineers. Nilu read machine learning at Oxford University and is the co-founder of two former startups.

Mathias Schindler is a Project Manager at Wikimedia Germany. An expert on copyright and open access he is a prolific writer for Wikipedia as well as for Netzpolitik.org. Schindler is one of the founding members of Wikimedia Germany, the major European chapter of the foundation which governs Wikipedia, the greatest encyclopedia in the world.

Martin Senftleben is Professor of Intellectual Property and Head of the Private Law Department at the VU University Amsterdam, and Senior Consultant at Bird & Bird. His activities focus on the reconciliation of private intellectual property rights with competing public interests of a social, cultural or economic nature. Current research topics concern flexible fair use copyright limitations, the enforcement of copyright in the digital environment, trademark law and the preservation of the public domain, and the liability of online platforms for the infringement of intellectual property rights.

Alek Tarkowski (born 1977) is a Polish sociologist, director of Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska and Public Lead of Creative Commons Poland. In 2008-2011 he was a member of the Board of Strategic Advisors to the Prime Minister of Poland. He serves as policy advisor to Creative Commons on open content policies in Europe.

Currently a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, Eleonora Rosati is an Italian-qualified lawyer with a few years’ experience in the field of IP having worked, among other things, in the IP departments of Bird&Bird LLP in Milan and London. A law graduate from the University of Florence, Eleonora holds an LLM from the University of Cambridge and a Ph.D. in EU copyright law from the European University Institute, Florence. She has written extensively in the field of copyright and is Deputy Editor of the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice. Eleonora is also a regular contributor to highly reputed The 1709 Blog and IPKat weblogs.